tap shit, errr, tap shift

Heh, me and my friend were having an argument. I showed him the ferrari pics posted by curiousgeorgeM3. He started saying that since its tap shift its gonna suck and so on. The reason its gonna "suck" is because "you can't skip gears", in other words you can't jump from 3rd down to 1st and vice versa.

I told him not all transmissions are the same, and its really easy to make a tap shift be able to skip gears, like, have two positions on it. In other words pull it a bit and switch one gear, pull it further and switch another. My mountain bike has the same things, it can't be hard to do that in a $100k^ car.

He goes on bitchin and saying it can't. In other words, him driving an automatic Grand Prix, and having a friend who drives a volvo with tap shift in it (which his friend barely uses, he on the other hand drove it once or twice) makes him an expert on automatics, stickshifts, and tapshifts.

Also, what in the fuck is he talking about it being bad since you cant skip gears. I don't know about anyone else, but i've been driving a stick car (69' vette) for about a year till another fucked up friend killed it. I've raced ricer-boys on and off and I have NEVER came to a situation where I needed to skip gears. Besides coming to a stop, why would you need to do that? Also, were not talking about professional racing, only drag.

uhhh... paddle shifters go up and down (at 2 and 10, respectively) which is all you need. you dont skip gears on the way up (unless you drive like your friend does) and coming down, the computer will shift down if its going to stall, or you can just do it yourself like any good stick driver. telly our friend he can ram that grand prix POS up his arse.

Your friend is a fuckin idiot. There's a reason why the fuel gets cut off shortly after the redline, it's so that the engine doesn't get damaged from over-revving. If you were too skip gears on your way down, you'd start killing your engine quickly, if you'd skip gears on your way up you'd either stall the engine or have quite slow acceleration until the engine reaches high rpms. Do this, go up to your pussy-assed friend, slap him, and take his GTP, he doesn't deserve a performance car. Unless it's a GT, then go laugh at him for pretending he has potential.

There are situations where you skip gears in downshifting. An example, when take a slow corner you many go from 4th to 2nd to get better rpms and more power out of the corner. On a track this can be especially true. Another example, taking a very tight off ramp on an interstate you may go from 6th to 4th or lower depending on how much speed is scrubbed off. The Ferrari paddle shifters allow you to do this.

Your friend is absolutly clueless and needs to get some experience driving a manual transmission before he shoots his mouth off.